Peter Sis Quotes

I sleep in peace, even if only in the company of lice, behind bars. The same could not be said of my incarcerators though they sleep in warm beds, next to their wives, in their homes.

It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.

Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich. The pilgrimage is a witness to the suffering we have seen for generations

The amount of suffering I've seen is beyond belief. The amount of inequality is beyond belief.

I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.

But as well may you, when urging a man up-hill with a heavy load upon his back, and with your lash also upon his back, tell him, that be has nothing to do either with the load or the lash.

Life is really hard for some people.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.

We're coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree; We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.

There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.

It's outrageous to line your pockets off the misery of the poor. Outrageous, the crimes some human beings must endure. It's a blessing to wash your face in the summer solstice rain. It's outrageous a man like me stand here and complain. But I'm tired.

… the unhappy Peasant cannot survive in his humble shelter; today pigswill is his only nourishment; what was once lavished on swine is now shared between man and beast. The People ask only for bread; they are even willing to pay for it with the sweat of their brows: at least let them eat it without watering it with tears.

A large portion of pauperism and misery is really attributable to bad government and injustice.

The poor man looks upon the law as an enemy, not as a friend. For him, the law is always taking something away.

There are millions out there who aren't getting an even break. They're being done down.

People who are underprivileged have more to grieve and have more to overcome.

I think it's criminal the way poverty is allowed to flourish.

The outrages of the powerful, the insolence of the rich, scorn of the proud, and malice of the uncharitable, all beating against the broken spirit of the unfortunate.

All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the 'perfect' can live content and oblivious.

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

I have come to believe that one thing people cannot bear is a sense of injustice. Poverty, cold, even hunger are more bearable than injustice.

While it is very sturdy of comfortable men to point out that life is unfair, the people it is unfair to are not apt to be morally or philosophically elevated by the announcement. If you are going to preach that unfairness is inescapable for some, good sense suggests that you also accept the inevitability of beastly behavior by people who have to carry the burden.

The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn't half so bad if it isn't you.